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Wanda Sykes is an American actress, voice actress, stand-up comedian, and writer. She is best known for voicing characters in various animated films, such as Stella the skunk in the 2006 DreamWorks film Over the Hedge, Bessy the Cow in the Paramount/Nickelodeon film Barnyard and its spin-off TV series, and Chloe the Canada goose and Sid's Granny in the Blue Sky Studios films Rio and Ice Age franchise (respectively). She is also well-known for voicing the Sofa Queen in the Fox animated sitcom Bob's Burgers and the Witch in the Nickelodeon series Bubble Guppies. Additionally, she guest-starred with Elmo in season 41 of Sesame Street.

For Disney, she voiced Innoko in Brother Bear 2. She also voiced Shirley B. Awesome in Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero and Thea in Doc McStuffins. In 2011, Sykes was initially signed on to appear in the musical comedy film The Muppets as Officer Ethel, interrogating the detained Muppet gang, but her scenes were cut. Additionally, she voiced Gregoria in Vampirina, Phee Genoa in Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and played Daphe Lido in the ABC TV show Black-ish.

Sykes was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and her family moved to Maryland when she was in the third grade. Her mother, Marion Louise (née Peoples), worked as a banker, and her father, Harry Ellsworth Sykes, was a U.S. Army colonel employed at the Pentagon. Her ancestry was traced back to a 1683 court case involving her ancestor, Elizabeth Banks, a free white woman and indentured servant, who gave birth to a biracial child, Mary Banks, fathered by a slave who inherited her mother's free status. According to historian Ira Berlin, a specialist in the history of American slavery, the Sykes family history is "the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present."

Sykes attended Arundel High School in Gambrills, Maryland, and went on to graduate from Hampton University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing and became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. After college, her first job was as a contracting specialist at the National Security Agency, where she worked for five years.

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